Welcome to your Wednesday open thread. Or should I say, is it Wednesday already? This week seems to be flying by for me. Share your thoughts below.
Here’s a really excellent piece by Matt Yglesias on the uselessness of fact-checking:
Heather MacDonald’s excellent piece on Dinesh D’Souza opens thusly:
Forbes magazine has now “fact-checked” Dinesh D’Souza’s infamous September 27 cover story, “How Obama Thinks,” and has uncovered one “slight” misrepresentation, it says, of an Obama speech on the BP oil spill. Such a “fact-checking” feint is irrelevant to this travesty of an article; you can’t “fact-check” a fever dream of paranoia and irrationality. Sickeningly, while “How Obama Thinks” is useless as a guide to the Obama presidency, it is all too representative of the hysteria that now runs through a significant portion of the right-wing media establishment. The article is worth analyzing at some length as an example of the lunacy that is poisoning much conservative discourse.
The whole piece is worth reading, but I wanted to dwell on the aside about fact-checking simply because this is something people periodically get a bit confused about. The genius and the horror of something like D’Souza’s argument is that it’s perfectly possible to put together something utterly loopy that makes no factual errors whatsoever. Indeed, in some ways punctiliousness about the facts is the signature of the conspiracy theorist. Glenn Beck’s TV show is, in its way, the most fact-filled program on cable. It’s just that you can string together a lot of data points in a nutty way if you want to.
I would say that Glenn Beck does a lot of selective editing of facts so I think it’s misleading to call it “factual.” I think Stephen Colbert’s word “truthiness” best represents what Glenn Beck is doing – picking a conclusion and editing the facts to fit that, reality be damned. Other conservative media types like to selectively edit videos or transcripts.
I think this is a great ad by Jack Conway against Rand Paul in the Kentucky Senate race:
Apparently Rand Paul is saying that the ad is misleading. However his words are captured forever by the internets. In context, his words are even worse than what’s in the commercial:
PAUL: Medicare is socialized medicine! People are afraid of that because they’ll say “ohhh, you’re against Medicare.” No, I’ll say “We have to do something different. We can’t just eliminate Medicare, but we have to get more to a market-based system.”
It’s counter-intuitive to a lot of people, but you have to pay for things if you want prices to come down. So you really need higher deductibles. And the real answer to Medicare would be a $2,000 deductible, but try selling that one in an election. But that’s the real answer, you have to pay for things, and when you do, you also get rid of price controls. So raise the deductible, you get rid of price controls, and you allow more competition. And you may have to allow more competition from other parties.
Oops! I hope the TV stations in Kentucky are now running Rand’s full clip.